Transcendence In The Literature Of The 1920s

The English literature of the 1920s is commonly treated in terms of its position within European or Anglo-American Modernism. This book argues that the English Literature of the period can be better understood when it is examined in the context of a more local social and literary history. Focusing principally on the novel, it sets modernist works alongside non-modernist and popular forms, looking at the engagement of these texts with social concerns, including sexuality, gender and class politics, Englishness, empire and the cultural pessimism which informed the formation of English as a modern University subject.The book includes studies of D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster as well as Rebecca West, Wyndham Lewis, Aldous Huxley and Sylvia Townsend Warner.Key Features:*The texts and authors covered in the book coincide with what is taught on popular option courses, e.g. Modernism; C20th Fiction; D H Lawrence; Virginia Woolf*Ranges across modernist, realist and popular forms of literature*New approaches to the classic works of the period*Covers current themes such as gender, politics, Englishness and empire

American Literature in Transition, 1920–1930 examines the dynamic interactions between social and literary fields during the so-called Jazz Age. It situates the era's place in the incremental evolution of American literature throughout the twentieth century. Essays from preeminent critics and historians analyze many overlapping aspects of American letters in the 1920s and re-evaluate an astonishingly diverse group of authors. Expansive in scope and daring in its mixture of eclectic methods, this book extends the most exciting advances made in the last several decades in the fields of modernist studies, ethnic literatures, African-American literature, gender studies, transnational studies, and the history of the book. It examines how the world of literature intersected with other arts, such as cinema, jazz, and theater, and explores the print culture in transition, with a focus on new publishing houses, trends in advertising, readership, and obscenity laws.

The title Ciphers of Transcendence reflects the philosophical interests of Patrick Masterson, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy of Religion, University College Dublin. Transcendence is a millefeuille term conveying layered and diverse nuances, from the first openness of human awareness towards the outside world, to the ultimate affirmation of and commitment to a loving and infinite Transcendent. Patrick Masterson has devoted his philosophical career to reflection upon the unfathomable nature of the latter, seeking to decipher instances and images of transcendence within the realm of limited human experience. Through teaching and writing he has shared with students and readers his deeply personal reflections on questions of primal importance. Patrick Masterson’s colleagues and students – all devoted friends – here offer, in return, their diverse perspectives. The essays deal in one way or another with transcendence, examined in dialogue with a roll call of thinkers across the ages, from ancient authors to medieval masters, modern giants to recent luminaries. The volume is enhanced by the inclusion of an essay by leading contemporary thinker Alasdair MacIntyre, and a poem from Seamus Heaney that evokes across the silence of solitude the tender presence of transcendence.

In The Art of Adapting Victorian Literature, 1848-1920, Karen E. Laird alternates between readings of nineteenth-century stage and twentieth-century silent film adaptations to investigate the working practices of the first adapters of Victorian fiction. Laird’s juxtaposition between stage and screen brings to life the dynamic culture of literary adaptation as it developed throughout the long nineteenth-century. Focusing on Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, and Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, Laird demonstrates how adaptations performed the valuable cultural work of expanding the original novel’s readership across class and gender divides, exporting the English novel to America, and commemorating the novelists through adaptations that functioned as virtual literary tourism. Bridging the divide between literary criticism, film studies, and theatre history, Laird’s book reveals how the Victorian adapters set the stage for our contemporary film adaptation industry.

The present “turn to religion” has also meant a rekindled interest in transcendence, a concept once deemed a relic of a metaphysical past. This volume approaches transcendence from a particular perspective: that of language and literature seen as a matrix of expression of transcendence and its interplay of immanence. The essays in this volume probe the poetic and literary devices through which transcendence has been solicited, evoked, and generated. This has also meant revisiting the long Christian tradition, not simply to rehabilitate it but as an indispensable source for present writing and thinking. “Thus, ultimately, the present anthology offers no apology for traditional views of transcendence and religious experience but presents original contributions to the poetics of transcendence that are sensitive to religious as well as a-religious languages in literature. It is argued that, in order to rethink meanings and the value of transcendence, rigorous ontological philosophy must once again face up to the imaginative potential of poetics.” (From the Introduction)

In the late 20s Heidegger begins to speak continually of something called 'transcendence' and of its radical centrality to the problem of fundamental ontology. In particular he connects this problem back to the terse, enigmatic and somehow almost buried analysis of SZ sect69. There has long been evidence for the importance of this problem for Heidegger, and there is mounting evidence for its centrality to the problem of division three of Being and Time. -- And yet, as a question, transcendence has received even less dedicated attention than the similarly decisive problem of temporality. This thesis seeks to remedy the above deficiency by applying itself wholly to the problem of fundamental ontological transcendence. -- This thesis is divided into three parts. The first offers a preliminary sketch for the problem by discussing Being and Time in general, along with the problems of the surrounding world in particular and the history of the concept of world. The second part is concerned with the unity of the problem and this means with the interpretation of transcendence as a radicalisation of the existential concept of world. The third part is concerned with the completeness of the phenomenon, thus it unfolds the previously won unity according to its connection with the problems of freedom, selfhood, historicity and the question of being. Throughout the whole analysis the phenomenon of transcendence will be clarified, and through this, the problem and the import of transcendence will be demonstrated.

During the first two decades of the twentieth century, Britain's imperial power and influence was at its height. These were years of daring, when adventurers sounded the mysteries of the deep sea and the distant poles, aviators sped through the skies, and new media technologies transformed communication. They were years of social upheaval, during which long-suppressed voices – particularly those of women, of the labouring classes, and of colonial subjects – grew louder and demanded to be heard. They were years of violence, of insurrection and political agitation, and of imperial conflicts that would encompass continents. By subjecting specific developments in literature and related culture to a fine-grained and historically-informed analysis, British Literature in Transition, 1900–1920: A New Age? explores the writing of this extraordinary period in all its complexity and vibrancy.